Communicating. It’s kind of like breathing. We do it every day without thinking much about it, yet we couldn’t last long without it. We interact with the people and world around us for our most basic needs: food and water, shelter, love and belonging, esteem, and achieving our potential, not to mention accomplishing our day-to-day tasks and life pursuits. Yet...

Generative Communication is grounded in a revolutionary new way of thinking about human communication. I've identified five interrelated portals that give entry into a Generative Communication mindset. Together, they offer an exciting new approach to our everyday interactions...

Many of us are stuck in old ways of thinking and communicating that limit our ability to work out difference. Generative Communication is a radical new mindset that creates an expanded understanding of problems, and workable solutions—all for the common good.

Sustainability leaders who communicate generatively welcome self-organizing spontaneity of creative innovation even in the messy conversations of disagreement.

The best “tool” available to us for mitigating the effects of climate change is our integrated ability to learn, think critically and communicate generatively through our everyday interactions. We may have to modulate our egos, self-interests and certainties as we genuinely seek to generate understanding, commitment, action and results—together—on behalf of the common good as well as ourselves.

Generative Communication is a way forward when deeply held values of individual rights and responsibility versus social rights and responsibilities get in the way of responding to Climate Change in significant ways. This blog explores these questions from the perspective of stakeholders of the U.S. Agricultural Industry. The conversation above offers a shorthand version of differing views in an imagined stakeholder group: agriculture (ag) consumers, ag producers, local university ag and climate change researchers, sustainability advocates, and local politicians. While comments may represent similar-minded folks, you can rest assured that each individual within the various stakeholder groups has a personal and unique point of view.

One reason for formulating the Generative Communication model—a new strategy for dealing with complex challenges—is the recognition that our world has grown so complex in the 21st century that there is more information to process and problems to solve than our individual brains can handle, even with the aid of intelligent computers.

Whether you’re a host or guest, you can ask questions to help generative conversations get started, prompting people to have fun being together and discussing things they’ve never thought much about before.

One reason for formulating the Generative Communication model—a new strategy for dealing with complex challenges—is the recognition that our world has grown so complex in the 21st century that there is more information to process and problems to solve than our individual brains can handle, even with the aid of intelligent computers.

For me, as close as I can figure, the idea of Generative Communication came from a slow-growing seed in the recesses of my mind, likely embedded in my DNA. Let’s call it “a propensity for challenging the status quo.”